by Tom Miller
“What did you see?” Danielle asked.
“My ma’s a county philosopher,” I said. “She got called for an evacuation. She didn’t know what she was flying into and brought me to help. It was four philosophers murdered. Two of them were children.”
“Oh my God,” Dar breathed.
“Yeah,” I said. “Then all summer long, one side behaved worse than the other. I think it’s settled down, finally.”
She nodded.
“You’d understand better than most, then,” she said. “I came up here to worry about tomorrow.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“I was wondering, too—well, whether you might like to come with me. You’d confuse a lot of people, which I would enjoy. And God knows we could use more bodies.”
I tried to decide whether she’d just asked me on a date.
“I’m supposed to teach tomorrow morning,” I said. “A bunch of Zeds, all hopeless cases. But maybe when you get back, you could tell me how it went? Over a cup of tea or a dish of ice cream or . . .”
“Are you asking me out?” she said, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“No, just—” And then I sat up straighter. “Yes.”
Danielle looked amused, but her eyes blazed with an unexpected warmth, too.
“I’ll probably be in a terrible mood when I get back. But, yes, you can buy me a glass of beer and I’ll tell you about it.”
She smoothed her hands over her trousers. “May I offer you a lift down?” She pulled a double-sealed tube of powdered aluminum from her handbag, opened the outer container, and snapped off the top of the inner ampoule.
“Well, now,” I said, flinching away from her. “I don’t want to say I’m a nervous transportee, but . . .”
“Don’t move,” she said.
Danielle drew a complicated sigil and then we were simply in one of the basement cubicles in the Gray Box. On the floor beneath me there was a film of sand.
I was too shocked to be terrified. Usually a transporter making a short hop extended her bubble an extra foot or two to ensure the edge didn’t injure her passengers. Danielle hadn’t bothered—if she had, she would have taken a chunk of the roof along for the ride, plus a good-sized piece of the wall we’d been leaning against. All she’d brought for a safety margin was a fraction of a fraction of an inch. She was either damn reckless or the finest transporter alive.
I inspected the seat of my pants and the soles of my shoes. They were intact.
“You don’t have to count your toes,” Dardanelles said archly. “I am a professional.”
Outside the room a sign read: TRANSPORT DESTINATION ZONE. KEEP AWAY! EXTREME DANGER!
That was as prescient a warning about Danielle Hardin as anyone could have ever offered.
17
While smokescreens had often been used to cover retreats or annoy the enemy, Mrs. Cadwallader took the unusual step of veiling her own force during its advance on the Korps des Philosophs regiments besieging Paris in 1871. She kept the screen in place throughout the ensuing twenty-one-minute battle, even as the fighting temporarily became desperate, with her women unable to see the enemy. But Cadwallader’s strategy succeeded in hiding her numbers: not until hours after the Prussian surrender did Field Marshal von Moltke realize that his ten thousand rauchbauers had been defeated by only two hundred corpswomen.
Victoria Ferris-Smythe, Empirical Philosophy: An American History, 1938
MY ZEDS THE NEXT morning flew better than I’d expected, but one of Tillie’s Ones wandered off into the clouds. It took Tillie, Essie, and me two hours to find her and coax her down. She landed with a scant ounce of powder left in her bag. Even Essie was yelling by the end.
“Damn it!” Tillie said to me once everyone was back on the ground. “Brock’s going to kill me for almost losing another one.”
“How the hell did she get all the way up there?” I asked, pointing at the cloud cover. “That’s eight thousand feet!”
“I don’t know,” said Tillie. “I don’t want to know. If I have to say one more word to her, I’m going to stab her.”
“Okay,” I said, “so how about I check your girls back in and you can take a few minutes to—”
A large group of women materialized on the landing field fifty yards away from us.
There were several hundred of them, shouting and screaming. Many held signs on sticks. One read: NO ZONE, NO WAY. Another: A VETERAN IS A VETERAN. A few wore Corps uniforms; others were in long, modest dresses that had been ripped and muddied. Nearly all had cuts or scrapes on their arms and faces. One lay on the ground naked and sobbing, with several women trying to wrap a coat around her shoulders. Near her, four or five other bodies were sprawled out, motionless. Beside them, a man was screaming out the most terrible insults, while a group of women brandished walking sticks and cudgels at him. A riderless horse climbed to its feet and went galloping away.
“What in God’s name . . . ?” Tillie said.
We ran over to investigate. I spotted Danielle, pushing her way out from the center of the crowd, looking thin and shaky. Her worst fears about the march seemed to have come true.
“Danielle!” I shouted to her. “How can we help?”
Her eyes fluttered as she staggered toward me. “Get the wounded to the hospital,” she said. “And could you possibly do something about him?”
The Trencher, who didn’t seem to care that he was outnumbered several hundred to one, was right back at it. “Whores!” he shouted. “If you were my wife I’d whip you till you knew your place. Prostituting yourself with those effeminate French, spreading your legs for those bloody German butchers—”
I walked up to the man and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned toward me and I punched him in the side of the face, my full weight behind the blow. He crumpled like his string of life had been cut. The man was about sixty, thin as a stork. He’d been wearing glasses that were now lying in pieces beside him on the ground.
“Shit,” I muttered. But too late to take it back.
I had a look at the most gravely wounded women. Three were unconscious. They looked like they’d been attacked—bruised, trampled, beaten. Another with a bullet wound in her abdomen, writhing in pain. One with a hole in her chest, blood bubbling out every time she breathed. Plus two with legs broken too severely to walk, one head wound so bad that most of her scalp had peeled back from her skull, and one broken nose with fragments of bone pushing through the skin. So, nine bad enough to evacuate by air. Plus the old man, who hadn’t moved since I’d hit him.
“Let’s get silver chloride over here!” I called.
Between purses and workbags, we found five tubes; I used half measures to stasis the worst off. My indicator strips returned at twenty minutes of stasis time.
“Harnesses!” I shouted to Essie. “We’re taking ten to the hospital by air.”
“We’re doing what?” Essie answered. But she got the Ones out of their harnesses and they began putting them on the stasied women.
“Robert, there’s three of us and ten of them,” Essie said.
“Get me the rope bag!” I yelled to one of Tillie’s novices.
I daisy-chained four of the stasied women together with straps, one to the next to the next. I would carry them as what we called a stringer. It was a dangerous configuration—the passengers would stream out forty feet behind me and swing like a pendulum every time I maneuvered. But I didn’t see an alternative. I would have taken more, but four passengers put me right up against my weight limit.
“Have you ever flown a stringer before?” Essie asked.
“Sure,” I said. “A couple times. With sandbags instead of people.”
I clipped the last stasied woman into place. I could hear Tillie yelling at Danielle.
“You come blasting right in!” Tillie shouted. “No warning. No check. You could have ripped apart my girls! I know that’s not how they teach transporting in the Corps.”
Dardanelles was in t
ears. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying.
“Why didn’t you take them straight to the hospital?” Tillie asked.
Dardanelles tried to compose herself. “If you have a tube of aluminum . . . I’ll try.” She was barely on her feet. It was only a few miles to Massachusetts General Hospital, but in her condition another transport could kill her.
“No tube!” I barked. “Tillie, two to fly.”
Tillie nodded—she’d never in her life not flown someone who needed it. We rigged Essie with two of the stasied casualties and then I helped Tillie buckle into the next pair.
“I’ll take the last two,” said Dardanelles, who looked a bit steadier now. She was putting on one of the extra harnesses. “I know how to fly. I’ve had passengers before.”
Well, if she was willing, a few minutes of hovering shouldn’t harm her, not like even a short transport could. That just left the other eight dozen less critically injured. I dashed off a message to Boston’s general police response glyph, so that they could arrange rides.
“Okay,” I called out. “Miss Blackroot, as the senior flier, we’re on you.”
“Up as you will,” Tillie said. “We’ll keep above two hundred feet so Robert doesn’t hit anything with that line. Mass General. Let’s go!” She launched and the rest of us followed.
I got off the ground without too much difficulty, but when I turned to match course with Tillie, my stringer, with six hundred pounds of passengers and rigging on it, swung wildly. It pulled me off the level and I slipped back toward the ground. I slammed my regulator on full and redrew.
“Come on,” I grunted.
My sigil took and I began to climb again. I followed, flying full out to keep up. The hospital was barely a two-minute trip by air, right in the middle of the crowded downtown streets. The landing field was marked on the roof instead of the ground.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I whispered.
A rooftop landing zone saved space, but it exposed incoming hoverers to all kinds of cross breezes. And if you missed . . .
Tillie, Essie, and Dardanelles landed ahead of me—though Danielle flinched on her approach and had to do a double dip to get down. I braked hard to give her room.
My stringer twisted and swung, yanking me forward and then back. I redrew and my sigil failed entirely.
I began to fall as the sigil’s residual power faded.
“Come on!” I growled, redrawing again.
I was dropping straight toward the apartment building next to the hospital.
“Come on!”
I drew a third time. It didn’t work. The last stasied body in line smashed into the apartment building’s roof, punching through it and sending a shower of slate shingles into the street below. The second body hit, followed by the third.
I drew a final time at maximum power. Somehow, the glyph took and we inched upward. I tried to catch my breath. Well, it wouldn’t hurt my passengers, though I saw a shocked-looking face staring up at me through the hole I’d knocked in the ceiling of his sixth-floor apartment.
I brought us down on the hospital ceiling, settling my four wounded into a twisted heap and myself beside them. Essie, Tillie, and Danielle were all watching me, their faces white as talc.
• • •
After we’d gotten the stasied on stretchers, after the police had arrived with nine vanloads of minor injuries, after too many doctors and nurses to count had berated me on some violation of protocol in running a mass-casualty evacuation, and after I had been interviewed by a detective baffled as to how a man could possibly fly, I found Dardanelles still on the hospital roof, slumped beside the door. She had her face in her hands.
“I thought you were dead when you went down,” she said to me.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been told I’m too stupid to die,” I replied.
I sat beside her. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’ll live,” she said. “Some of the ones we brought won’t.”
“What happened?” I asked her. “The march?”
“Everything went wrong. There were only six hundred of us, against every last diehard Trencher in the mid-Atlantic—plus railroad men, sailors on leave, millworkers. Anyone interested in shaking up a few girls. Thousands of them.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“The public safety commissioner had told us outright that if you provoke the Trenchers, you deserve the consequences. So, there were barely any police along the route. Most of the ones who did turn out watched from the sidelines and cheered. We didn’t even get lined up before the crowd started throwing beer bottles. They were yelling about what they would do to us. I thought it was just to scare us, but then some of them started exposing themselves. They got hold of a couple of women. They ripped their clothes off.”
“My God,” I whispered.
“I was on a float right in the middle of our group. I could see everything, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I was just standing there, screaming and praying that good sense would break out, that twenty men weren’t going to rape a woman in the street with a thousand witnesses looking on. But they only egged one another on. The women who had walking sticks or clubs tried to beat them back. And then it was just a brawl everywhere.”
She looked at me with a flat expression of hopelessness. She was so far beyond tears or reassurance that I couldn’t think of what to say.
“How did you get out?” I asked.
“The smokecarvers came prepared. Some of them had canisters in their purses with smokescreens. They threw them out at the perimeter. You never saw men run so fast, climbing right over one another. Some had stronger stuff—stink gas or tear gas—and they streamed that out, too. It threw the Trenchers into an even bigger panic. A few of them fired into the middle of us with guns. Then I heard shouting for transporters to measure lines. Anna Blackwell—you’ve heard of her, right?”
“No.”
“One of the organizers. She pulled me down off the float and told me to evacuate the first group because I could draw the widest field. Take as many as I could. Our other transporters would move the rest. I had string and a stick of chalk in my handbag, so I walked off a twenty-foot radius. I was combining tubes that people had in their handbags or stuck in their brassieres to get enough powder. We packed in as many women as we could. We were in pretty good order. The other transporters were setting up their bubbles, too. And then the cavalry came crashing through.”
“What happened?”
“Blackwell’s a veteran. She saved a man’s life in Cuba. He’s a general now at Fort Myer, just across the river in Virginia. She warned him that there might be trouble, so he took two hundred cavalrymen and camped in one of the parks in Washington. In case something went wrong. Blackwell was messaging him the whole time.”
I winced. “And he showed up at the wrong moment?”
“They charged the Trenchers with swords drawn. But that drove them right back across the smokescreen and into us. I was yelling to clear the edge and suddenly I had another hundred women scrambling over the red line with Trenchers right behind them. I eyeballed it. I wasn’t sure I would have enough range. But the Trenchers were yanking cavalrymen off their horses. So I did it.”
“And thank God you did.”
“No!” Danielle sobbed. “I didn’t dress my lines. I didn’t check for a clear destination. If I didn’t kill anyone or take off somebody’s arm, that’s sheer dumb luck.”
“I didn’t see any loose arms. Or heads.”
“I cratered the street to a depth of thirty feet. I left behind two hundred people. I left behind Patrice—she and I went together and promised we’d each make sure the other got home safe.”
“Danielle—”
“I was so stupid.” She was slurring her words. “We had destination sigils set up in Washington, but I couldn’t find my black book. I drew the first destination I could remember. I practiced down there on the field by the aerodrome every day my freshman year. Back and forth, across the river. The d
ay I die, my corpse will still be able to shape those glyphs. So, I jumped us from Washington to Boston because it was the only place I could think of.”
“That’s four hundred miles,” I said.
“I lost twelve pounds. It’s too much at once.”
And suddenly it all made sense—the odd greenish pallor to her skin, the breathlessness, the look of hopeless exhaustion. Not hysteria or anger, not even philosophical fatigue of the sort I’d suffered on the night I evacuated the Kleins. Rather, acute transporting toxicity.
“You need a doctor, too, then!” I said. “Let me get you down—”
“No!” Danielle pleaded. “No more hospitals. You can’t force me. If I didn’t collapse already, it’s not going to kill me.”
She would know best, but she looked dreadful. I thought of the old cures: foods rich in potassium and calcium and dense with calories.
“Stay here a minute,” I said.
I flew down to a market on the street below and tore out the lining of my skysuit’s sleeve where I kept a ten-dollar bill sewn in case of emergency. I bought a chocolate cake, a sack of oranges, a bunch of bananas, a couple quarts of mineral water, and a pint of milk.
“What’s all this?” Dardanelles asked when I returned. She looked like she was dying.
“You have to eat,” I said. “Isn’t that how it works?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I feel sick.”
I peeled an orange for her. I wasn’t even hungry and the smell was marvelous. “Just a couple pieces and I’ll fly you home.”
I handed her a section, which she bit into and chewed mechanically. Once she’d started, she wolfed down the rest of the orange, then a couple more and most of the bananas. I cut the cake with my belt knife and she ate three slices, washing it down with the milk and both bottles of water. By that time she looked much improved, but was nodding off midbite.
“I hate eating like that so much,” she muttered. “I know I should do it, but I hate it.”
“I’ll take you home,” I said.
“I’ll take myself,” she murmured, but didn’t complain when I stood her up and attached her to my chest. “You don’t have to put me—it’s better if I ride in back, right?”